The Sea-Kings of Crete | Page 8

was the Moon; and the Labyrinth was the tower on
whose walls the astronomers of the day traced the wanderings of the
heavenly bodies, 'an image of the starry heaven, with its infinitely
winding paths, in which, nevertheless, the sun and moon so surely
move about.' Among rationalizing explanations this must surely hold
the palm for cumbrousness and complexity, and we may be thankful
that the explorer's spade has demolished it along with other theories,
and given back to us, as we shall see, at least the elements of a romance
such as that which was so dear to the Athenian public.
CHAPTER II
THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION
Between the Greece of such legends as those which we have been
considering and the Greece of the earliest historic period there has
always been a great gulf of darkness. On the one side a land of
seemingly fabulous Kings and heroes and monsters, of fabulous palaces
and cities; on the other side. Greece as we know it in the infant stages
of its development, with a totally different state of society, a totally
different organization and culture; and in the interval no one could say
how many generations, concerning which, and their conditions and
developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed
as though the marvellous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it
were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of
nothing to its height of splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to
have risen beneath the hands of their divine builders. Indeed, a certain

section of students seemed rather to glory in the fact of this seeming
isolation of Greek culture, and to deem it little short of profanity to
seek any pre-existing sources for it. 'The fathering of the Greek on the
pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid Hellenists
in terms which implied that they hold it little else than impiety.
Allowing no causation more earthly than vague local influences of air
and light, mountain and sea, they would have Hellenism born into the
world by a miracle of generation, like its own Athena from the head of
Zeus.'[*] But a great civilization can never be accounted for in this
miraculous fashion. The origins of even Egyptian culture have begun to
yield themselves to patient research, and it is not permissible to believe
that the Greek nation was born in a day into its great inheritance, or that
it derived nothing from earlier ages and races.
[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, 'Ionia and the East,' p. 21.]
Indeed, the supreme monument of the matchless literature of Hellas
bore witness to the fact that, prior to the beginnings of Greek history,
there had existed on Greek soil a civilization of a very high type,
differing from, in some respects even superior to, that which succeeded
it, but manifestly refusing to be left out of consideration in any attempt
to describe the beginnings of Greek culture. The Homeric poems shone
like a beacon light across the dark gulf which separated the Hellas of
myth from the Hellas of history, testifying to a splendour that had been
before the darkness, and prophesying of a splendour that should be
when the darkness had passed. But the very brilliance of their pictures
and the magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to
the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty of
deriving the culture of historic Greece by legitimate filiation from a
past which seemed to have no connection and no community of
character with it. For the Homeric civilization was not a different stage
of development of that same civilization which appears when the first
beginnings of what we are accustomed to call Hellenism are presented
to us; it was totally diverse, and in many respects more complex and
more splendid.
From the eighth century onwards we are on moderately safe ground

when dealing with the history of Hellas and its culture. We know
something of the actual facts of its history, literary and political. The
chronicles of the more important cities are known with a definiteness
fairly comparable to what we might expect at such a stage of
development. But the Homeric poems take us away from all that into a
world in which a totally different state of things prevails. The very
geography is not that of the historical Hellenic period. The names that
are familiar to us as those of the chief Greek cities and states are of
comparatively minor importance in the Homeric world; Athens is
mentioned, but not with any prominence; Corinth is merely a
dependency of its neighbour Mycenæ; Sparta only ranks along with
other towns of Laconia; Delphi and Olympia have not yet assumed
anything like the place which they afterwards occupy as religious
centres